3mo ago

Bluesky made more money selling T-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg in one day than it has in two years of selling custom domains

I thought this was slightly funny.

Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.

Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says "a world without Caesars" in Latin.

216 comments

Where’s Brutus when you need him?
- This is so fetch
  
  Stop trying to make fetch happen
  
  What does this mean? Am I old?
- Last i heard he was in New York
Zuckerberg wears t-shirts comparing himself to Julius Caesar? Why is that every time I think I’m up-to-date on the latest weirdness there’s more of it?
- If you think thats weird you haven't even scratched the surface on Zuck. He actually idolizes Emperor Augustus Caesar so much that he copied the guys haircut for most of his career. Behind the Bastards does a good job of highlighting it. If you want a quick readable version, here's the first non paywalled article I could find. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-fascinated-by-augustus-future-of-facebook-2018-9
  
  So... Zuck stans the guy who ended the Republic and turned it into a monarchy that pretended to still be a republic?
  Well, that's not concerning at all.
  
  Thanks for the correction, it’s Augustus Cesar. Still, what an odd connection. Good article btw.
  
  All of this is literally unbelievable for me. I don’t even have words to express how unexpectedly odd reading comments in this thread has been.
  
  I didn't realize Ed Zitron had another podcast
- Here you go:
  At Meta’s annual Connect event in Menlo Park, Calif., Zuckerberg wore a custom T-shirt with the Latin phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” or “all Zuck or all nothing,” as he revealed the first working prototype of Meta’s augmented-reality glasses.
  The phrase was a play on “aut Caesar aut nihil,” which means “either a Caesar or nothing,” or more simply “all or nothing.”
  Zuckerberg has long been interested in the Roman Empire. He spent his honeymoon in Rome and two of his children, August and Aurelia, are named after emperors Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.
  Incidentally, fascists tend to have a hard-on for ancient Rome, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
  
  Zuck puts out this weird “pick me” or “me too” energy lately, trying to fashion himself as one compatible with Trump’s world. His interest in Rome may precede Trump’s ascension to power, but his coming out is not a coincidence in my view. And yes, a fascination with Rome started as so many other things as an “innocent” meme and became a fascist dog-whistle.
  
  I'm not racist. I'm just really into 1940's German artillery. For the engineering, you know. /s
- Roman empire, like the nordic pagan BS is also a (extreme) right-wing fetish.
  So glad to see our new PM celebrating his election win like this:
  
  Sorry but which country is this? Can you elaborate on that photo?
  
  To be fair, Roman history is really cool.
  
  Lol his face... It's like he knows this is a bad idea and he has no idea how he ended up there.
  That or he's just an idiot and his face always looks like that.
  
  Which country? Looks like a swede in italy 😋
- He's not doing those roman salutes in public yet, though.
  But it's kinda funny that the oligarchs are so obsessed with Rome, famous for being a fallen empire, while enabling the fall of the US.
  
  And Nazis. Maybe, just maybe it has something to do with unchecked power?
  
  Such a shame that Coppola’s movie was bad. He was onto something there.
- I wonder why all these high profile people are so fascinated with a dictator that oversaw the transformation of a republic into an empire. Just like fascists were/are. Must be just a coincidence! Just like that Musk salute from the heart.
  
  To be fair, that was more Augustus.
- The reason behind his weird android haircut is that he thought it looked Caesar-esque.
- He is comparing himself to Caesar? Maybe someone should stab him to help him out.
- Zuckerberg wears t-shirts comparing himself to Julius Caesar?
  Yet March 15 has come and gone yet again without Zuck having a bad day.
- I feel like if anybody knows anything about history that's the thing they know.
  
  And who killed hitler
- Zuckerberg doesn't seem like he has the charisma for that.
  I can't really remember hearing him speak at all tbh
  
  I do, when he was talking about rolling back facebooks moderation. His voice still sounds robotic, those hair implants ain't fooling anyone.
  
  He's not a charismatic speaker, but he is an effective speaker. In the same way text to speech is. Basically, in a world were Elons exist and public speak, he's very easy to listen to and understand.
This is my kind of monetization.
Feels way better than getting features pulled and put behind an increasingly higher paywall.
- Give it time.
So is lemmy or mastodon selling shirts yet? if not, why not?
- I was on Reddit for 12 years with nearly a million Karma, and I got permabanned soon after the Inauguration for repeating an anti-MAGA opinion I had posted numerous times before he was elected.
  I came over to Lemmy, and discovered that I was only one victim of a bloodbath, demonstrating that Reddit had decided to forego their free speech mission, and grovel for their new masters. Pathetic punk ass corporation.
  I never wore a Reddit shirt, but I'd happily wear a Lemmy shirt.
  
  I had an 11-year old Reddit account permabanned and they didn't even give me a reason. Feels bad man
  
  They just go where the money is, and if that means going to a dictator, that's what they'll do.
  
  Poor blue maga, while anyone with a consciense was permabanned from Reddit loooong ago by Jessica Ashoosh, now their slightly more right wing sister party has done it to them.
  You had so much free speech as long as it was the US regime narrative.
  Says more about you people than Reddit.
- No one's taken my lunch money in awhile wearing Linux t-shirts. I need to up my game - I'd buy a Lemmy shirt.
  
  TBF they'd probably take your lunch money for wearing a shirt with some latin words on it too
- I imagine selling t-shirts would be against the Marxist/Leninist ideology of Lenny’s devs?
  But given the volume of non-tankie instances now up and running, I’m sure some enterprising admins would be willing to give it a go.
  ..and as long as they’re ethically sourced (no sweatshops), high quality (materials and GSM), and reasonably priced (accounting for the other two factors) - I’m all for it!
  
  If they are ethically made by union labor, there is nothing anti marxist about selling a shirts. 😁
  
  Che Guevara t-shirts seem to get sold quite a lot.
- The Mastodon project put a lot of energy into a high quality plushy.
  
  That must have been frustrating when the user base responded "but I already got my Blåhaj"
- well, because everyone has the right to sell one, basically
  
  Everyone has a right to sell a shirt with some latin words written on it too. That didn't stop bluesky from making a bunch of money doing so.
- Mastodon has merch, but it sells out near-instantly.
  
  Got a link to where this stuff can be bought when available?
Ofcourse they ain’t making shit from custom domains. Anyone who is interested in connecting a domain to their Bsky account and has the skills or patience to learn how to probably already has a domain bought at another registrar to connect to.
- Also they only make referral fees because they're not a registrar themselves
- Also most people won't care anyway. Even big businesses are unlikely to really be that bothered.
  For years everyone's been fine with Twitter and that never had custom domains.
  
  But up until recently, Twitter used the blue checks to verify identity. Bluesky (as far as I know) doesn't verify anyone's identity. Instead, your domain name is your verification.
- No, its because they don't advertise it at all. The page for buying them has the date 2023 on it.
That's cool but I'll check back in to see which fascist technocrat is running bluesky in 8 years
- In 8 years, anyone not mainlining Truth Social through their compulsory Neuralink will captured and euthanized.
- Yeah, it's kinda sad but that will probably happen.
- In theory, Bluesky is supposed to be immune to that due to it being open source. In practice, I don't know what that would look like. The architecture seems to be much less decentralized than ActivityPub (which is what Mastodon uses).
Who got a link? I wanna buy one
- https://worldwithoutcaesars.com/
  edit: fyi it's a cool $50 after shipping
  
  Not for me, I live in Australia. USD$80 shipped. I'll pass
it’s a fire shirt not gonna lie
- You are thinking of Nero!
  
  touché
Their custom domain business can't be big, I am assuming they merely get some referral commission from sending business to a registrar, that can't be a lot of money.
Or am I missing something?
- True, but they also just don't fucking advertise it at all, and its on a forgotten subdomain only linked to in a blogpost, and the date on the page still says 2023 at the bottom.
https://worldwithoutcaesars.com/
- As much as I hate to be that guy, it's worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
  ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It's better to leave your money elsewhere.
  
  I obviously support ActivityPub or I wouldn’t be posting this here but one of the AtProtocol developers bought a Raspberry Pi with 8GB ram and added an NVME drive. He’s trying to prove (or possibly make) this point wrong. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team
  So far, it seems like it’s “working” but he’s found some things that are way too slow and needs to be fixed for it to run on a Raspberry Pi. But that gives me some confidence that the developers, at least, aren’t trying to make it so only people with deep pockets can run an instance. (I don’t know what the investors want but the developers aren’t scheming assholes.)
  It’s probably going to ultimately be a situation where anyone with a high end PC (by today’s standards) can run their own instance. It’s definitely not an A.I. situation where you have to reopen Three Mile Island and piss away more water than Nestle to self-host.
  
  Still a cool shirt tho.
  
  I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. The IT world is full of people developing their own thing because they think they can do better, and sometimes they succeed and make something nice. Who knows, maybe they'll turn out alright?
  Then they took crypto bro venture capital and my charitable optimism went out the window.
  
  ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible.
  Traditionally, that's what new major version numbers are for. IF (and I stress the "if" because I have no clue about protocol design) it turns out that AT has useful features, a merger of ideas of both ActivityPub and AT could lead to ActivityPub 2.0.
  That would be somewhat similar to AMD's proprietary Mantle leading to Vulkan (which was originally intended to launch as OpenGL 5.0).
  
  only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists
  Or non-profits that are willing to accept money from supporters.
  ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible.
  Because AT protocol has features that are incompatible with ActivityPub, and those features are important to some users.
  
  I don't mind people setting up for-profit businesses. After all it's what you're supposed to do in a capitalist society, but the issue with it is when company start putting profit before people. As long as they don't do that I'm not bothered that they make business-minded decisions.
  
  ActivityPub is just as susceptible to centralization as people claim Bluesky is with the only difference being that at least Bluesky has made some sort of mechanism for credible exit. It's old news that its expensive to run the perceived expensive parts, if fact you could do without it as many devs in the community are doing. ActivityPub is literally the easiest one to monetize because it can lead to moat building and user capture. It's why Meta is more than willing to become the biggest node in the Fediverse with Threads.
of course the android wears a shirt with latin phrases.
"The king is dead, long live the king".
Or: Same shit, different wrapping.
- This for-profit social platform will be different guys!
- Well, one is a public benefit company, the other is not. So not exactly the same shit.
I swear there really are two types of people who learn latin…
- Lawyers and biologists?
  
  I was going for a specific type of nerd with fascist sympathies ans a very different specific type of nerd with antifascist sympathies. But also yes
Why is he doing that? Is he competing with Elon Musk on stupidity?
- It occurred right around when the kingdom in orange took power. Somehow zuck thought that it would be advantageous to his interests to compare himself to Caesar during an obvious triumvirate. The orange one and phony stark would be crassus and pompey by extension. But I think commodus is a far more appropriate roman emperor for zuck to choose as his patron saint
  
  lol well Commodus associated him self with Hercules and fought in fake gladiator matches in the arena, so they both had a lot to overcompensate for as it seems. Good match.
That's all well and good, but the problem remains: Namely, the fact that Meta earns far more every day than all companies worldwide earn from the sale of T-shirts put together - much, much more. And Meta pretty much doesn't even sell anything physical (Oculus, c'mon). They mainly just sell massive reach for advertisements and PR (influencing opinions). In addition they sell, the personal data of users to make that work devilishly acuarate. As long as the vast majority doesn't care how this business model works and what power the centralization of attention actually means even for their own reality, nothing will change, I'm afraid.
I mean why is this surprising? Custom domains are a very niche thing; the majority of people don't know or don't care.
I'm going to state an unpopular opinion. Bluesky should have ads, not a personalized ads that track users, but just simple ones at the very top of the feed. Consumers today are too addicted to free services, and companies need to be financially independent so that they can support a quality product.
- Ads incentivize them to make the platform addicting and to prioritize ragebait because it will cause people to stay engaged in the app longer.
- Agreed. Being financially independent can also foster ad investments and lead to a popularity gain
- Free services? Where?
  Free services don't really exist.
  
  Could you suggest alternate wording that succinctly conveys what the commenter obviously meant?
  
  If you mean somebody, somewhere is footing the bill, then sure, if you torture the definition of "free" enough, then nothing on Earth is free. It is worth pointing out that if you enjoy (for example) Wikipedia, then you should donate if you can, because Wikipedia runs on donations. If you're just trying to be a pedantic jackass, though, that's another thing.
  
  You're saying this on lemmy.
What about "Tu quoque, Brute"?
- Would be cool to pretend stab this guy in the metaverse to remind him what happens to Caesars.
I bet that if you tell Markie that Caesar was a probably bisexual man affected by mini-strokes and/or epilepsy, he would make those t-shirts disappear in a minute.
Ignorance is bliss.
- Augustus, not Julius.
  
  Gaius Julius Caesar, most probably bisexual as widely accepted in Roman society, rumored to have been having an affair with the King of Bithynia and affected by mini-strokes or epilepsy.
Hmm, yes, ads bad but that IS a good product
Every little bit helps.
I guess most people who want to use a domain as their username aready have that domain.

216 comments